Lori Anderson Moseman

A Note on the Work

These text and image pairings are excerpted from "The Anthropocene: A Null Set for Puppets?", the first section of a full length manuscript in-progress — Light Each Pause: My Continuum Hypothesis, which revisits Georg Cantor’s notions of infinity relative to planetary glacial melt. Within these encaustic paintings, found puppets (and a purchased automata made by Jeffrey Maib) play with our precarious hour. Though whimsical, they ask: “How shall we then live?” Poems scour the history of set theory to posit a viable “constructive set” within which we mortals can flourish. Breakthrough moments in the life of Cantor’s “Continuum Hypothesis” offer hope (e.g. works of Kurt Gödel and Paul Cohen as showcased in Dana MacKenzie's The Universe in Zero Words). So does Paul Klee’s art and notebooks. Post-election, I now need to rewrite (overwrite) the overlord with a new set of poems.

The Anthropocene: A Null Set for Puppets?

Null Set for Puppets?

piano hammer, a pony
doorstop, a slippery slope

no. merely measure
making an opening

a singular 16th note

silenced portal, beauty
playful pail, this ladder

less a scale than a boat
shoehorn, a giant anchor,

{ } a little bit infinite

Pause is not a null set

(not anything to do with emptiness).

Pause is a puppet.

Later, a lady, is the puzzle

of a countable
disjoint union

(negligible set Y
and measurable set X).

((a story of difference))

One defines µ(Y) to equal µ(X).

After, a good helpmate, is the logic:

“A measurable set X is called a null set if µ(X) = 0.

A subset of a null set is called a negligible set.

A negligible set need not be measurable,
but every measurable negligible set is
automatically a null set.

A measure is called complete

if every negligible set is measurable.”

A Quick 16th Note

“somewhere” repeated

our diminishing

physiological space

our atmospheric thinking

as if “the” 7th movement

whimsy subpoenas “again”

& “against” & “invented

angels angles”

Arithmetically in His Bauhaus Course Notes

another canon
another excess toward totality

softly
a periphery
tickles

each barb of the feather
aligned as wing

beats

timpanists
oblivious to yellow

dipped
tale

Tail

to follow
X’s elevation of Y
(ontological
twitter)

a waxwing’s call, encaustic merger

flow
growth upheaval

not enough
not enough
not enough

adopt
anew
a new animality?

When Merleau-Ponty Adopted Jacob von Uexküll’s Account

of animal & its “Umwelt”
I was born (edge
of a sapphire mine, fishery)
and promptly moved

at 58 (edge
of a cement mind, fishy)
I am still
“a melody singing itself”

who isn’t?
a dark lake treble
a linen fold
a susceptibility to color
to analytic method
to crisscrossing
sensory pathways